Bad Parent: 96 Degrees in the Shade
I took my preschooler to Burning Man.
by Kris Vagner
June 26, 2008
As for the debauchery, it's true what you've heard. People find the most imaginative ways to indulge their carnal desires at Burning Man. Most of that happens behind closed tent flaps, but anything could happen anywhere. The event is structured more like a city than a concert, with blocks and districts and a lot of uncrowded open space. That structure has a major advantage: IF the vibe in a particular area started to seem too lascivious or drunken, we simply moved on to the nearest tree house or lemonade stand.
Mostly, we avoided the likelihood of running into adults-only activity by spending time in Kidsville, the child-friendly camp where a few dozen families gathered. The kids wandered around in little packs, happily riding their bikes up and down the "street" or jumping on trampolines with hot dust-and-jelly sandwiches in their hands. A group of nine-year-old girls came around to advertise their noontime story hour for preschoolers. At night, teens showed off their impressive poi-spinning skills and shot cannons full of glow sticks into the air. Good clean fun in the eye of the storm.
While the climate and the partying were definitely things to be vigilant about, my biggest concern that we wouldn't get enough sleep. The slightest deprivation sends my normally sunshiny demeanor straight to hell. I made it a point to try for eight hours a night. If my son fell asleep in the bicycle trailer while we were wandering around at night, I gave myself a one-hour limit to get us back to the tent and get to bed. Burning Man is loud, but a combination of earplugs and perpetual exhaustion did the trick. Our official count of stupid arguments triggered by me being tired was three. Same as a normal week.
The kids wandered around in little packs, happily riding their bikes up and down the "street."
I confess I was a little jealous of all the grown-ups who flounced around without curfews, the ones who got to marvel at the lunar eclipse, watch the man burn unofficially after an act of arson, dance till dawn, then keep dancing till noon. But if you've been a parent for any length of time, you're used to parties raging on without you. I downshifted to kid gear, and, as often happens, I had a really good time running around looking at things from a preschooler's eye view. My son was mightily impressed with the huge sculpture made of tanker trucks bending backward over each other, but he also wanted to spend a lot of time just playing with Matchbox cars in the dirt or sucking down Otter Pops with his new pals.
The highlight was the night I packed a couple of kids and a pile of pillows into a big wagon and pulled them around to all the fire-spewing sculptures and fire-spinning dancers we could find. They giggled and squealed for a couple solid hours. My son made his usual request: "Can we stay here for a long, long time?" By that point, I no longer cared about what I was missing. I just felt privileged to be the one showing them that there were adults out there who could make blueberry smoothies in a bicycle-powered blender; who would haul an entire roller disco to the desert; who could assemble a camp called "Whoville," where they stood on stools and read our favorite book with gusto, then dished out salty helpings of actual green scrambled eggs with diced ham — adults whose powers of imagination could compete with a three-year-old's.
Photos: Kris Vagner
©2008 Kris Vagner and Nerve Media
About the Author
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For three years, Kris Vagner covered arts and culture (and accidentally became an award-winning sportswriter) for magazines and alt-newsweeklies in Reno. She recently resettled in San Francisco, where she and her almost-four-year-old son can't get enough of those scary-steep cable-car rides. |
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